Intonations

Intonation

The volume Intonation: Analysis, Modelling and Technology covers the main aspects of intonation, written by international researchers in the field. Following the Introduction, fourteen chapters are organised into five thematic sections: Overview of Intonation, Prominence and Focus, Boundaries and Discourse, Intonation Modelling and Intonation Technology. Each chapter is basically autonomous within a thematic section, but the subject of several chapters extends over more than one thematic section. The combination of a wide range of research areas, as well as interdisciplinary approaches in the study of intonation, makes this volume a unique contribution to the international scientific community. Basic knowledge of Intonation and Prosody is assumed in the context of linguistic and computational backgrounds. Readers may range from students of advanced undergraduate to postgraduate and research levels as well as individual researchers within a variety of disciplines such as Experimental Phonetics, General and Computational Linguistics, Computer Science, and Speech-Language Engineering.

Development of a Device to Record Graphically Intonations of Speech as They are Perceived by a Listener

Intonation and Its Parts

"It's not what she said, it's the way that she said it," is a complaint we have all heard (or made) some time or another. What does it refer to? It obviously relates to the various forms of wordless communication, but especially to the speaker's use of intonation—the rise and fall of the pitch of the voice—to convey sarcasm or resignation, anger or apprehension, or any of scores of other moods. In this summation of over forty years of investigation and reflection, the author analyzes the nature, variety and utility of intonation, using some 700 examples from everyday English speech. The work looks at both accent (pitch shift that points up individual words) and overall configurations (melodies that shape the meaning of whole sentences). It shows that most easily understood utterances employ one or another of a surprisingly small stock of basic melodies, and it shows both intonation and visible gesture to be parts of a larger complex that conveys grammatical as well as emotional information. Though it is one of the major divisions of the science of linguistics, intonation is of great interest to others outside of linguistics—to actors and lawyers who must use the voice to assert, to downplay, or to emote; to English teachers as an essential ingredient of idiomatic speech; to musicians for its many common elements in music theory; and to psychologists and anthropologists as a gauge of emotional tension and a clue to behavior.